Different Worlds of Different Peoples

The Different use of Inner-Human Forces

Cultural Area and Language

Gaps in Experience between Different Cultural Areas

The Task
of the Tonality

Describing
the Diverse Atmospheres
of Life

Peoples do not know the customs and experiences of other peoples, and therefore will naturally convey only their own habits and experiences – in their own language, their own expressions.

An aborigine of the Australian bush may not know the lights of a city, but he is familiar with the sounds of the night in the bush, and just as a city-dweller, in his language, spontaneously expresses the day-to-day life of the city, a man living in the bush naturally expresses the manifold world of the jungle.

In our own cultural area in Germany, for example, we know the phenomenon called "Gemuetlichkeit": a phenomenon of finer levels, of a more refined field of life. Take, for example, a cozy gathering of friends at the fireplace. Silence prevails, interrupted only by the quiet crackle of the fire, giving rise to a mental-emotional familiarity between the participants.

The experience of such group-consciousness characterized by silence can be verbally communicated in the language of our culture, and our people will have a natural understanding and an inner sensitivity for this situation in which feeling dominates. Naturally, it is not the physical environment of the fireplace which generates the impression of "Gemuetlichkeit" so familiar to us, but the century-old cultivation of a sense of togetherness.

We know that an American, for instance, may hardly understand our concept of "Gemuetlichkeit," much in the same way his concept of a spruce cocktail party will appear strange to us.

On a superficial level, we recognize these gaps in experience between different cultural areas from those words which express a particular feeling of life in one language and are used unchanged in another language. Thus, an American uses our word "Gemuetlichkeit" with as little success at home, as we use his term "cocktail party" in our country.

The task of the tonality is to describe the various atmospheres of life.

Tonalities differ from each other just as the various environments of men differ from each other quite substantially.

And just as man, in different environments, naturally adopts quite different ways of life, likewise, the motif unfolds differently in different tonalities and describes these different ways of unfoldment in quite different melodies.